Nibble, nibble little star

By Clare KermondJuly 18 2002

Tom Brice is, by his own admission, a deeply scarred man. He speaks slowly, eyes wide with remembered horror: "To this day it's something I'll never really get over, it's like looking into the face of the abyss or your worst nightmare."

Brice is not the survivor of some horrendous crime, he does not live in a warravaged part of the globe; he's a New Yorker and he has lived with rats.

With his wife, Sharon, Brice is one of the stars of Rat, a docudrama by Australian film maker Mark Lewis. Sitting at his spotless kitchen table, Brice takes us through the harrowing months of his battle: "Flight or fight, and at first I decided to fight. I began a campaign... I mean the biggest thing a man has is to protect his family."

But, alas, the Brice family lost the war, they lost their home, their neighbourhood and, it seems, their peace of mind. Haunted by their experiences, the pair can never escape the niggling fear that rats might be lurking somewhere just out of sight.

It's the kind of fear that viewers may feel too after watching Rat. Was that a scratching noise, something scuttling under the floorboards, a tail disappearing just out of sight?");document.write("

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Lewis is best known to Australian viewers for his first film, Cane Toads, which was made in 1988 on a shoestring and went on to become what he affectionately calls "the little film that could", winning international acclaim.

To find the people featured in Rat, the expatriate film maker, who now lives in Los Angeles, ran an advertisement in a New York newspaper and conducted dozens of phone interviews, although some of those interviewed were "a little too eccentric" for selection.

Lewis laughs at the memory of those who didn't make the final cut: "There was this one guy... Oh, no, I can't!"

It's hard to believe there are people out there more eccentric or more obsessive than the Brices and the other New Yorkers who tell their tales about rats.

One tenant, Alex Kapuscinski, explains in quiet, rational tones how he began catching the rats in his building, carrying the caged rodents out after dark and letting them loose streets away. After he discovered that the same rats kept coming back, Kapuscinski started releasing them outside the kitchen door of a nearby vegetarian restaurant. The rats stopped coming back and to Kapuscinski his campaign made perfect sense: "I thought, rats, vegetarians, that works."

Lewis says the choice of location for Rat was obvious. Just as everybody in Queensland has a tale about cane toads, so it is with New Yorkers and their rats.

"They are as much films about the people as they are about the animals. The film is also a look at New York and the people who make it up. I deliberately tried to mix up people in the film. We had an Irish American, a guy from the upper west side, a lady from the Bronx," he says.

For the humans in Rat, the rodents have become almost mythical creatures, an enemy spoken about in tones of awe. Lewis talks about rats with respect, if not affection. Part of his aim in making the film was to dispel myths about them.

His film is peppered with facts, for example that in 1996 in New York, 184 people were bitten by rats; 1102 people were bitten by other New Yorkers.

During two months of filming in New York sewers, subways and on the docks, Lewis was never frightened of rats. It was the New Yorkers who sometimes worried him.

Lewis has made two documentaries since Rat, Animaliscious, screening on the ABC next week, and The Natural History of the Chicken.

But he leads something of a double life. Between his animal "passion pieces", Lewis is busy writing and producing more mainstream fare. He was the second unit director on Little Women, starring Winona Ryder, and has directed several episodes of the children's show Round the Twist. His current project is a theatrical film about a wolf.